Martes, Oktubre 18, 2016
When Judith Martin first started her Miss Manners advice column in the 1970s, there was no such thing as blogs, forums or social media. So, when Judith made statements like: “You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you.” She was just thinking about the ways that people communicated in person or over the phone.
What do her comments mean in today’s online world? Is her philosophy still relevant? Absolutely!
If you’re open, honest and helpful online, people will come to respect you and you’ll have the opportunity to build long term relationships that in turn can lead to increased sales and increased loyalty. On the other hand, if you ignore social media or use it to simply broadcast information, what will happen? Nothing. You won’t have the opportunity to build deeper relationships with your customers. You won’t have the opportunity to wow your prospects. The scary part of nothing is that even though the inactivity will impact your bottom line, at the end of the day you’ll never know what customers you’re losing or what opportunities you’re missing as a result.
So, what are the most common mistakes being made today? Here’s what I see as the most common social media marketing techniques that Miss Manners would not approve of:
Overreliance on automation
On paper automation is a great thing and you can:
· Just set up a simple rule to thank everyone that mentions you
· Write a single canned response for all support inquiries
· Click once and watch as a single message goes out via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
But when responding to inquiries or thanking your followers for sharing your content, why not take a couple seconds to recognize customers by name and what they said? When submitting to multiple channels, why not take a minute to ensure the message fits the medium? Make no mistake, you don’t want to continually reinvent the wheel and you should always automate tasks that don’t require human judgment, but be careful to not let automation take over your accounts.
Reposting content and begging for ReTweets
While estimates vary, it’s a well-known fact that 100% of your Tweets will not be read by 100% of your audience. In fact, many users of Twitter follow so many people that if they don’t happen to be online the very minute that you Tweet your content, they’ll never see it. Why not post every single Tweet at 9am, noon and 5pm to maximize your impact? Yes, there are people only on at 9am, but there are also people on at 9am noon and 5pm. Reposting key content is a valuable way to ensure its read but make sure you balance the need to increase your exposure with the risk of overexposure to your most loyal readers.
Unresponsiveness
When someone picks up the phone and calls you, even if they ask a stupid or incendiary question, do you simply hang up on them? Then why outright ignore the same person online?
While there’s a variety of ways inquiries can be addressed:
· A simple “thanks” or “we apologize for any inconvenience” can go a long way
· When it’s possible to quickly resolve the issue, don’t just tell them to “log a case” at 1-800-Not-Here. Do what you can to answer immediately or at the least pass start the ball rolling for them
· In some cases, if you’ve built a strong community, it’s best to let the question may just “answer itself”
· And, for common inquiries, sending along a link to your FAQ may be all it takes
Almost any response is better than no response and if you ignore a customer today they may just ignore you when it comes time to renew or increase their investment.
Excessive self-promotion
Despite what anyone else tells you, the ROI of social media is not measurable in dollars and cents. Unfortunately, many others, including a number of CEOs and CFOs that sign off on marketing’s budget think otherwise and there’s no shortage of reports to prove them right.
Most modern marketing ROI calculations go something like this:
· One Tweet = 100 clicks
· 100 clicks = 30 form completions
· 30 form completions = 10 sales ready leads
· 10 sales ready leads convert into 1 sale
So, if you want to maximize the ROI the logic is simple right? Clearly every Tweet must lead to a “contact us” form focused on a specific product you offer:
· Track the click, track the sale and you’ve proved the value of social media
· Fail to promote your offers, fail to link to your website and others with tracked links will show off a report proving they deserve credit for the increase in sales
At the end of the day, if you can connect the dots between social media and sales, by all means do so. But if you let ROI reporting drive the way that you approach social media you’ll be leaving money on the table and losing the opportunity to establish a more meaningful connection with your target audience.
Agree, disagree, questions?
Let me close by saying there’s exceptions to every rule, what works for me may not work for you and vice versa.
